Are Expensive Clothes Worth It?

In Defense of $300 Jeans

Is a pair of really worth a night out in Vegas, a five-star dinner, or even a month's rent?

At first glance, the Caitac wet-processing denim facility near Los Angeles seems more like an alien crash site than the last stop for many of the country's premium jeans. But this is where $300 denim comes to life, and so I'm here, notebook in hand, watching workers scurry about in white protective suits, goggles, and face masks.

In one room, a man hand-sprays a potassium permanganate compound onto denim plumped to anatomical fullness by leg-shaped balloons. The jeans look like half-finished humans, enshrouded by this purple chemical mist. In other rooms, amid the hum of machinery and the heat of 300°F ovens, men and women carry out sanding, grinding, whiskering, and sandblasting by hand, all with great care, all with a reverence normally reserved for precious moon rocks or laboratory samples—not something that ends up in a ball on your bedroom floor.

Spending $300 on jeans sounded crazy to me before I arrived here with Jeff Shafer, the owner and designer of the California-based premium-denim label Agave. Agave is one of a dozen high-end brands that use Caitac to finish (or sometimes rough up) jeans that can cost as much as $250. "High-end jeans are like microbrew beers," Shafer says. "Sometimes a Bud is great, but if you're someone with discerning taste, then you'll know why the good stuff is worth it. There's a passion for what's behind the finished product."

Shafer might sound like an oil exec trying to explain $4 gas in times of record profits: According to a market analysis by the NPD Group, men's premium denim sales rose 45 percent last year in the United States, accounting for more than half of the $5 billion men spent on new jeans. But as Shafer explains, the Caitac finishing plant is only the last stop in a whirlwind tour of the globe for his jeans, each step of which adds heft to the price tag.

High-end denim is born rich. The fiber of choice for these brands, Supima cotton, makes up only 3 percent of the world's cotton production, and because it's stronger and finer than the strains popular in the United States, it's also more expensive to produce and process. The good stuff slips right through American saw-ginning machines, so it's shipped to Switzerland, where roller gins spin it into yarn. That spun yarn is then moved to Japan or Italy for dyeing and then woven into fabric on modern shuttle looms—or vintage American shuttle looms that were shed by manufacturers in the 1950s and are now prized as rare commodities overseas.

Finally, the fabric makes it back to the United States for cutting and sewing before its Caitac send-off. Both steps could be done overseas, but Shafer says he's willing to absorb the additional $30 of production costs for each pair to come to life under his watch.

"We might have lost the looms, but we still have the history and the heritage," Shafer says. "You don't buy champagne from China. You don't buy tequila from Turkey. America is where denim was born."